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Liquid Cooling Exhibits

(chipsandcheese.com)
42 points ryandotsmith | 1 comments | 01 Sep 25 18:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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ForOldHack ◴[05 Sep 25 14:04 UTC] No.45138734[source]▶
These are some very innovative ideas and they totally and completely side step the need of AI for fresh water, leakages and alternative coolants.
replies(2): >>45138922 #>>45140438 #
sniffers ◴[05 Sep 25 14:19 UTC] No.45138922[source]▶
They definitely don't. The water consumption of AI is not happening in the cooling blocks in the racks, it's happening outside in cooling towers. The heat a data center produces must be removed from the data center, and that is typically done via evaporation. The hot water interfaces with evaporative cooling towers and moves back inside to cool the chips again.

It would be neat if we could harvest that heat and use it for some purpose, but today we largely use it to make steam.

replies(2): >>45143081 #>>45143825 #
owenversteeg ◴[05 Sep 25 20:11 UTC] No.45143081[source]▶
The issue with harvesting the waste heat is the temperature of it (low.) I commented about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007358
replies(1): >>45152956 #
1. sniffers ◴[06 Sep 25 21:21 UTC] No.45152956[source]▶
Totally. I'm imagining something like heating for residential or greenhouses. Or a preheated input to some other heating process. One could presumably also spend energy to concentrate it a bit, but it's never going to turn turbines.

Still, the mind wonders -- here's a pocket of relatively warm, surely we could do something with that waste?